This Vast Land Is All Mine
The village meeting took place after dinner.
The first item on the agenda was how to deal with the thugs.
When the villagers pressed them during what they called an interrogation, the thugs all spoke with one voice: the real mastermind was someone else.
They claimed they had simply followed orders from another person. They insisted they had never wanted to do such things in the first place.
A couple of villagers stepped forward, saying it might be true that the thugs had been dragged along by the ringleader without much choice. They had seen the group huddled together whispering several times, but at the time they had simply assumed the young men were becoming close friends.
They testified that the person who had spoken most assertively back then had not been any of these thugs, but another man.
That supposed ringleader was nowhere to be found among the villagers. It seemed he had taken advantage of the chaos to slip away.
My initial suspicion that there had been one more person was not a mistake after all.
We decided to determine how to handle the thugs based on their future behavior. For now, they would all be put to work clearing fields.
Trees were one thing, but the current land was littered with stones so large that mere pebbles were the least of our problems. Honestly, I had no idea where to even begin with this ground. It didn’t look like it could become a field even after several years. That was probably why they called it a frontier.
Still, the more hands available for labor, the better. The thugs seemed to have thought they were going to die. When we untied their ropes, several of them burst into tears. One even collapsed to the ground and sobbed for a long time.
He was the one who had mistaken me for a mage when I tried to grab Popcorn. This guy didn’t seem like the type to become a bandit. I wondered how he had ended up involved in such things.
After that, we distributed the supplied goods. Each household received two large sacks of flour, along with fair shares of salt, spices, hard bread, fabric, and various other items. There were also several crates containing axes, hammers, and farming tools.
When we counted by type, there were more tools than people.
“This is truly wonderful,” one villager said.
The people stroked the farming implements as if they were treasures, their faces bright with joy. It seemed that tools in this world broke or wore out quite frequently. They would repair them as best they could, but eventually new ones had to be purchased. For poor farmers, the cost was apparently quite burdensome.
Popcorn had never seen farming tools before—of course he hadn’t, since he was born from my body—and he dove excitedly into one of the crates. The light that usually couldn’t be seen clearly from other places sparkled brilliantly whenever it struck the iron.
Nothing was actually there, yet the flickering light danced among the tools, and the people grew noisy.
A spirit is blessing the farming tools!
“It’s a spirit.”
“The spirit has come.”
“It’s a Spirit’s Blessing. The spirit is giving its blessing to the tools.”
“Our village is going to have a bountiful harvest this year!”
No, Popcorn was simply flying around between the farming implements. He wasn’t doing anything like deliberately bestowing blessings for the people’s sake.
Maybe all spirits just play around like this, and somehow it ends up benefiting humans.
Just like how swimming in hot stew makes the food taste better, or how jumping into unboiled water somehow disinfects it, perhaps spirits didn’t act with any particular intention. They might simply be happily playing around, and that alone brought good fortune.
While the adults chattered excitedly, Ji-geu and the other children exchanged glances. There were only four children left in the village. I had heard there were more when the journey to the frontier began, but many had not survived the harsh trek.
The child who often fought with Ji-geu had once had a sibling, but I was told the brother had died just before I joined them. The deceased child had apparently been weak from not eating properly. After losing his sibling, the boy had been quite sharp-tempered for a while.
His father had once said gloomily that Ji-geu’s frequent fights with the boy might stem from the fact that the child still couldn’t accept his brother’s death.
The four children who had survived that brutal journey were truly blessed with good fortune. The villagers often nodded and said these children would definitely grow up to be adults.
In this world, many children died before reaching adulthood. The villagers’ words probably carried the hope that these four would not share that fate. Like the Earth saying that words become seeds, the people here seemed to believe that constantly saying “you’ll grow well” and “you’ll do well” might make it come true.
The villagers washed the children—even those who weren’t their own—together, and whenever the kids fought, everyone watched with fond smiles. If a child misbehaved, any adult would scold them, and even the child’s own parents would smile while watching. Perhaps they were all seeing the images of the children they had lost on the journey through these surviving ones.
The four children seemed to be gauging one another before they suddenly dashed toward the crate of farming tools.
“This one’s mine!”
“Our family’s taking this!”
“This one received the most blessing!”
“Mine’s the best!”
It seemed even the children knew that a Spirit’s Blessing was a good thing. Each of them grabbed one tool and spat on it. I don’t mean that figuratively—they literally spat into their palms and rubbed the saliva onto the handles.
The adults burst into hearty laughter at the sight. Seeing this, Popcorn wiggled his fluffy bottom and clung to the tools as well. He moved his head several times as if covering his mouth to sneeze, apparently trying to spit too. Each time, tiny sparks of light scattered onto the iron and glittered.
Ji-geu, looking greedy, abandoned his own tool and latched onto the one Popcorn had chosen.
“I want this one!”
Of course, the grass is always greener. As soon as Ji-geu grabbed it, the other children rushed over to take it from him.
“You kids! That’s dangerous!”
When I grabbed Ji-geu and the others by the scruffs of their necks, Popcorn trembled and leaped up, pushing his body against my fingertips. It seemed he wanted to be grabbed by the neck too. Did he want to copy everything the children did?
Even though he was a spirit, he really was just newly born and still very young.
While the children competitively clung to the tools and claimed them as their own, the adults began dividing up the rest of the implements. The ones the children had chosen were taken away by their smiling fathers.
Popcorn seemed to have set his heart on one of the remaining tools.
“Pi-pi-pi-pi-pi-pi!”
He rolled round and round beside it in a clear “this one, this one!” pose. It was impressive how he could roll like that even though he was in midair.
Even though the children had already claimed their own tools, they kept staring at the one Popcorn had marked.
“Isn’t that one shining the brightest?”
“It looks like it.”
“Are there maybe ten spirits?”
“Maybe a hundred?”
“If we take that one home, will all the spirits come to our house?”
“But what if the spirit that’s already on ours gets angry?”
“R-right… There must be spirits that don’t get along, right?”
The children’s conversation was amusing. Popcorn probably couldn’t understand human speech, but he seemed to sense the atmosphere. He hugged the tool tightly as if to say no way. Of course, it just looked like a fluffy creature clinging to a hoe.
Worried that Popcorn might actually start fighting with the children, I picked up that particular hoe myself. The children looked a little disappointed, but all four of them nodded as if they had come to some understanding.
“It’s shining even brighter now that the mage is holding it.”
“Well, he is a mage.”
“Dad said mages are close with spirits. That’s why.”
“I heard our country is in chaos because there aren’t enough spirits.”
“I heard that too. The mages are getting weaker because so many spirits have disappeared. People are worried that other countries might invade.”
When I asked the person beside me after overhearing the children, they confirmed it was true.
“We simple farming folk don’t know much, but the chief said so. That’s why it’s better to settle in the frontier.”
“I heard the same. If we stayed, we might have been conscripted within a few years.”
“They don’t conscript people in the frontier, after all.”
So the lack of spirits wasn’t only related to farming.
The villagers exchanged glances before one of them asked me, “Are you all right, mage?”
I wasn’t a mage, so I had nothing to do with the power of spirits. When I said so, the villagers looked at one another again and nodded, saying, “Yes, yes.”
Ji-geu asked his father worriedly, “Is our mage getting weaker too?”
“I don’t know about that, but as long as he has enough power to send a person flying, it’s plenty. No need to worry.”
“That’s a relief.”
The one who said that wasn’t Ji-geu, but another child.
It seemed that my being a mage was very important to the villagers. Well, in a place like this, having someone with power—whether a mage or anything else—would certainly be reassuring. Whether I was truly a mage or not probably didn’t matter much. What mattered was that I had shown them real power in front of their eyes.
If they knew I possessed genuine strength and not some deception, the rest would be trivial details.
Receiving the children’s expectant gazes, I muttered inwardly to Popcorn.
I’m counting on you, Popcorn. Protect us.
He probably couldn’t hear me, yet Popcorn thrust one arm straight up into the air as if to say leave it to me.
It was well past noon, but there were still several hours until sunset. After the meeting ended, the people headed toward the fields they had claimed. Some began carrying farming tools and axes to their plots. It would be better to have such things close at hand while working the land.
I also started moving my belongings little by little to my own land.
“Pi-pi-pi-pi.”
Popcorn wobbled along, pretending to help carry things. Of course, he wasn’t any help at all. Not even a fingernail’s worth. It seemed his power only burst out suddenly when I was in danger. A little disappointing.
My land…
This vast land was all mine.
Back on Earth, even if you had hundreds of millions, you couldn’t buy this much land. And there was still plenty more available—if I got greedy, I could claim as much as I wanted.
Looking at the ground covered in trees and stones, my nose somehow grew hot. Thinking about cultivating all of it in the future, I couldn’t tell if I felt happy or sad.
Once the supplied flour and jerky ran out, I would have to survive entirely by what I grew with my own hands. Could someone who had only ever lived in a city really do that?
“Pi-pi-pi, pi-pi-pi-pi.”
Perhaps sensing my worry, Popcorn flew right up to my face and tilted his head. Since his face and body weren’t clearly distinguished, his whole form wobbled from side to side.
“It’s fine. No one is born knowing how to farm. When the time comes, you just figure it out.”
When I spoke to him, Popcorn raised both arms high above his head. It seemed he had misunderstood me again.
“Hoo…”
I let out a small sigh.
I was told wheat should be sown around this coming winter. The problem was what came before that. The supplied flour and jerky wouldn’t be enough to last the year, so I would need to catch small animals with traps or gather wild fruits and vegetables from the forest. I decided to learn those methods and types gradually from the villagers.
For now, my goal was to clear the ground little by little every day and create small fields. Among the supplied seeds, some were meant to be sown in spring. I needed to plant them within this month if I wanted anything to eat before winter arrived.
“I have to work hard.”
If I messed up, I really could starve to death.
Muttering to myself, I sat down and began sorting through the stones on the ground. For starters, I would remove only those bigger than my fist.
“....”
There were too many stones. The ones I cleared from a space the size of my palm quickly formed a small pile.
“Maybe I should make a fence with these.”
It seemed like a good idea to build a low wall on the forest side to keep herbivores like deer from entering the field. I carried the stones I had gathered over to the forest edge.
I diligently picked stones from the ground, and once I had a decent amount, I carried them to the forest. I must have repeated this dozens of times. Sweat poured down like a waterfall, so I eventually took off my top.
“Farming really is tough.”
I felt like I had been clearing stones for several hours, yet it barely showed. I hadn’t even started proper farming yet, and I was already exhausted.
They said the peddlers would come in a few days.
I should order a cart, or at least materials to build one. It would make things a bit easier.
Popcorn bounced around the field like a rubber ball, looking incredibly excited about something.
It would be nice if the ground where a spirit runs around just crumbled into fertilizer.
But such a miracle probably wouldn’t happen.
While I was thinking useless thoughts and setting down another load of stones at the forest edge, I saw a massive shadow moving deep within the woods.
My body froze for a moment.
Although I had been dragged into various disputes and incidents, I was still a city person. I had no connection to giant things lurking in forests.
Wait… now that I thought about it, wild boars had appeared in the middle of Seoul before. I had encountered that rare event twice.
“....”
Huh, that’s strange. That shape looks familiar somehow.
That’s probably…